NW Dance Project opened its evening of spring performances at the end of May with a strong message to the audience, delivered in the written program as well as via an ardent curtain speech by Artistic Director Sarah Slipper and resident choreographer Ihsan Rustem — namely that the arts are under siege. These artists have plenty of right to be worried given the recent termination of hundreds of National Endowment for the Arts grants of federal funding, which sets a precedent for the nation’s financial priorities.

The art of dance, in particular, historically provides a site of expression that slips below the touchstones of written or spoken language, often invoking covert or overt queer expression. Even in small doses, queerness can be interpreted as a threat by those committed to upholding the status quo of cisgender and heteronormative culture in the United States, as evidenced by the 588 anti-LGBTQ+ bills being tracked by the American Civil Liberties Union this year.

Even still, this evening of works by two choreographers, Gustavo Ramírez Sansano and Rustem, called forth queer readings of their subject matter and source material — Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the music of Edith Piaf — inviting a celebration of intimate relationships of different sorts that illuminate the spirit and power of the company as a collective.

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The performance began with Sansano’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream — Titania & Oberon, a work of playfulness, parody, and pandemonium. The hijinks of the work hinge on the involvement of the fairy Puck, danced by Alejandra Preciado, who overflowed with flamboyance and stirred up mischief in this well-cast role. The piece opened as Puck walked holding a glowing red umbrella under the half-raised stage curtain, symbolizing a rainy eve.

The curtain opened entirely to reveal a lavish scene: a decorative awning framing Titania and Oberon, fairy royalty danced by stoic Gabriel Canepa and firey Ingrid Ferdinand, buffered by their fairy court. They began dancing to the familiar tune of Amazing Grace, an unusual choice, and the score vacillated throughout with experimental sound by the likes of Laurie Anderson and Ian William Craig, among others.

Titania and Oberon posed charismatically and bickered amongst themselves with gestures of annoyance from behind two golden freestanding costumes, part of the set, with design influences from the Japanese Edo period aesthetic. Try as I could, I could not find any clear link in this dance to the Japanese history or influence within the decidedly Western story unfolding onstage, which made for the most confusing, if not questionable, aspect of this performance.

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Drama unfolded as Titania and Oberon took the stage, in nude sparse costumes with decorative silver chains, a touch of queer excess. They scuffled over Oberon’s interest in The Changeling, danced by Anthony Milian, with Titania eventually dominating and seducing him to spite Oberon. Here, I found wells of appreciation for this problematic polycule and the presence of potentially bisexual or pansexual masculine characters, both of which are underrepresented identities in dance and the greater cultural landscape.

The fairy court contributed flair and delightful subtlety to the drama, with gentle chest taps from their picnic blanket, and Mateo Vidals reciting and then rhythmically rapping lines in Shakespearian English. They also danced in unison across the front of the stage in fabulous clown outfits, complete with overalls, heart sunglasses and yellow clown collars. Armando Brydson fell out of cync with this group in a glitching solo of repeated movements, prey to the Puck who had picked him out of the bunch. Puck transformed him with a gentle onstage costume change into Bottom, a man-turned-donkey and Shakespeare’s quintessential furry.

As the story goes, Oberon used Puck’s magic to make Titania fall in love with donkey-man Bottom to spite her in return. Brydson danced a compelling Bottom, complete with many donkey kicks and unwitting “hee-haws,” braying in the wake of his nonconsensual transformation. “Bottom” offers another deeply queer reference to a receptive sexual partner, subject to the affections of a magically smitten Titania. The two danced a sexy and nuanced partnering wherein Titania, at one moment, spread Bottom over her thigh. This unfolded to brilliant backlighting by the evening’s lighting designer, Jeff Forbes. This light poured from a huge light mounted on stage, meant to mimic the moon.

Using a red daisy from Puck, Oberon dusted Titania’s nose, lifting her enchantment with Bottom. A series of lights-down, lights-up moments unfolded to reveal campy and dramatic fallout of Titania’s disenchantment, humorous reactions of horror and laughter, eventually unfurling into joyous cast-wide dancing. Puck closed out the scene with a soliloquy, an attempt to make “amends” for all the hijinks. And so ended a performance that boldly pulled queer subtext to the fore, offering a contemporary take on what has always existed between the lines of Shakespeare’s contributions to culture.

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After a brief intermission, the evening’s performances continued with Rustem’s La Môme Piaf, a tribute to the French lyricist and singer Édith Piaf. The performance opened with a person in a black dress and a black bob standing in front of the stage curtain, still drawn, next to a bright lamp with no shade. This person turned around to reveal themselves as Vidals in drag, as evidenced by his characteristic moustache, gesturing to a voiceover of an interview with Piaf.

The curtain lifted to reveal the entire company of dancers in identical outfits: black dresses and bobs, all in drag as Piaf, dancing in a bubbly and idiosyncratic fashion to her music. Every dancer looked incredible in their drag, a display of simultaneous difference and sameness. As per my experience of Rustem’s past work, the collective emerged here as a character within the dance, but this time stronger and more fiery. The large light from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was lifted up and illuminated this dynamic, like a moon moving higher into the sky to offer a bit of continuity between the pieces.

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After this number, the cast transitioned into various khaki pants, blouses, polos and vests. Brydson and Milian took the stage for a sentimental, queer duet, sharing a romantic kiss onstage. They partnered one another with prowess and grace. Another less romantic, more feisty duet followed between Ferdinand and Vidals, with Ferdinand standing on Vidals’s chest and even moving him along by the scruff of his shirt. The piece progressed with energetic solos, duets, and trios from various cast members.

I noticed in this work, as well as the previous, that the physics of partnering motifs felt full of integrity, carefully engineered with mindful application of momentum and force such that grabbing and physical manipulation was not necessitated. In plainer terms, the dancers seemed to fly over one another — even in the case of moments when the masculine cast all lifted and lofted flexible and fanciful Preciado and then Beatriz García Díaz. The latter brought an especially allusive spiraling quality to this motif that I wish I were able to experience more of throughout the entire evening.

The performance ended with robust ensemble dancing by the whole cast, a final vigorous push to close out this evening — the final show May 31, one day before the start of Pride month. It remains hard to hold the long view with small victories in this greater light — the hope for opportunities for more trans and gender-nonconforming dancers on stage, for adequate healthcare that would allow for these dancers to continue evolving their craft far into the future, and the hope for unrestricted arts funding, not contingent on capitalist or political agendas, to support all of this. Even still, this evening marked a special moment in my experience of NW Dance Project, the spark of collective power congealed through undeniably queer dance.